Dwa Nieba by Bożena Urszula Malinowska
On 1 March, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 3 Comments
- Videopoems
http://vimeo.com/20305333
Filmmaker Marcin Konrad Malinowski‘s first videopoem, for a poem by his mother. Here’s the English translation he provided:
You and me,
Two heavens,
With a little bit of hell,
With the energy of a volcano
That has gone somewhere,
You and me.
His mother passed away four years ago, he told me in an email, leaving behind a box of poems.
UPDATE: Marcin has started a blog on Tumblr about the project, which hopefully will give rise to many more videopoems of this caliber: Dwa Nieba. (It’s in Polish, but Google Translate can give a pretty good idea of the contents.)
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
I interpreted the spare text alone as having an affectionate, wistfully sad tone. When I watched and listened to the videopoem, I was startled by its harshnesses — black and white film, torturous sound track, disturbing body images. This text could be presented (audio, video) with several different interpretations. I wonder how the mother intended it to be delivered? I wonder, when the mother wrote the poem, who the “You and me” were? Intriguing post that leaves me asking so many questions…
Yes, I love the way the text combines with the film to make something which is more than the sum of its parts: the defintion of good videopoetry. Of course, it may not be the interpretation his mother intended, but every creative reading makes a new poem, does it not?
Malinowski shares some thoughts about videopoetry at his Polish-language tumblelog, if you want to run it through Google Translate or Babelfish: here.